i was playing around with AIRSHIPS! today, and its time to start thinking about how to draw the world.
the game is a WW1 airship flight sim, with an alternate history where all sides have helium, and the player can fly for any of 5 different nations.
at one end of the scale is what i have right now, a single ground texture drawn out to the horizon in all directions, as a big flat plane:
the game world stretches from the Arctic Circle to North Africa, and from the Urals to the Mississippi:
at the other end of the scale. i can hand edit a world map with a custom editor. but i'm an army of one here, and would rather do this a quickly as possible. i realize that better results will take longer. you have to break a few eggs to make a real mayonnaise, and Rome wasn't built in a day.
i haven't really thought about the options. obviously some sort of height map elevation will be desirable, as well as being able to designate different types of terrain textures, such as pastures vs no man's land.
perhaps using a paint program to create bitmaps for use as height and texture maps. or to make a terrain map which determines what heightmap formula and texture set to use to generate chunks procedurally.
i have engine code to handle any necessary terrain chunking, rendering, etc, its mostly about an efficient way to build the data to be rendered.
convert photos to maps? import elevation data from somewhere?